Required command line arguments¶

There are only two command line argument you have to provide when starting vinyld: ‘-b’ for where the backend server can be contacted, and ‘-a’ for which sockets vinyld should serve.

If you have installed Vinyl Cache through using a provided operating system bound package, you will find the startup options here:

Debian, Ubuntu: /etc/default/vinyl
Red Hat, Centos: /etc/sysconfig/vinyl
FreeBSD: /etc/rc.conf (See also: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/vinyld)

‘-a’ <[name=][listen_address[,PROTO|,option=value,…]]>¶

Each ‘-a’ argument defines one endpoint which vinyld should service HTTP requests on.

The default is :80,http to listen on the Well Known Port for HTTP. If your webserver runs on the same machine, you will likely have to move it to another port number or bind it to a loopback address first.

Multiple ‘-a’ arguments can be provided to service multiple endpoints. name is the local.socket name for VCL. listen_address can be an IPv4 or IPv6 address with a port, a unix domain socket path or an abstract socket. See vinyld for more details.

Here are some examples:

-a http=:80
-a localhost:80,HTTP
-a 192.168.1.100:8080
-a '[fe80::1]:80'
-a '0.0.0.0:8080,[::]:8081'
-a uds=/my/path,PROXY,mode=666
-a @abstract_socket

‘-f’ VCL-file or ‘-b’ backend¶

Vinyld needs to know where to find the HTTP server it is caching for. You can either specify it with the ‘-b’ argument, or you can put it in your own VCL file, specified with the ‘-f’ argument.

Using ‘-b’ is a quick way to get started:

-b localhost:81
-b thatotherserver.example.com:80
-b 192.168.1.2:80

Notice that if you specify a name, it can at most resolve to one IPv4 and one IPv6 address.

For more advanced use, you will want to specify a VCL program with -f, but you can start with as little as just:

backend default {
        .host = "localhost:81";
}

which is, by the way, precisely what ‘-b’ does.

Optional arguments¶

For a complete list of the command line arguments please see vinyld(1) options.